On a sunny March day in downtown Chicago,
Peter, a spindly, 6'6", thirty-two-year-old man with a clean-shaven
head, wearing the red-and-black sweats of his college alma mater, met
me at a coffee shop. I arrived early and grabbed a table in a quiet
area of this psychedelic place with pumpkin-colored walls and beads
hanging in the doorway that reminded me of Greg Brady's room. New age
music played in the background as billows of smoke lingered overhead.

When Peter walked over to me, I had to
tilt my neck to meet his eyes. We exchanged hellos and he shook my hand
nervously. His befuddled countenance and fretful body language gave way
to an emotional floodgate. We sat down and he divulged that he had
become overwhelmed by his quest for the right partner. He was currently
in a relationship with a woman named Molly whom he loved dearly. She
happened to be sleeping in his bed at the time of our conversation. He
had lied to her in order to meet me, I was startled to learn: he had
told her he was going to the gym because he didn't want her to know he
was meeting me to talk about his relationships angst. Molly loved Peter
and, a year into their relationship, she had started talking about
marriage. Peter loved her in return, but he was not sure he was ready
to take the plunge. This wasn't the first time Peter had faced this
dilemma. His relationship before this one had been with a woman named
Katy. He talked about Katy with even more fondness than he did about
the trustfully sleeping Molly. The first time he uttered Katy's name,
the sides of his mouth curled up with delight. Katy also loved him, he
said, and it was obvious by his adulatory description of her that he
cared deeply for her. Katy had also made it clear to Peter that she had
wanted to get married. But the situation had been identical: he was not
completely "sure" with her either. Katy grew tired of waiting and
eventually assumed he was never going to propose; she finally left him.
"When I realized what I was letting go, I campaigned to get her back.
It didn't work and I regret it," he explained with a vexed expression.
Katy was now with someone else and it pained Peter. When he told me
about Katy's new boyfriend, he looked down at the table and fingered
the chrome sugar bowl.

Peter thought that something was wrong
with him because he had been unable to commit not only with these two
women but also with others: "I've had five serious relationships and I
could have been married to four of the women. They were all amazing.
Two of them were my best friends. All of them wanted the commitment and
I didn't. It wasn't that they weren't right. I never took a chance." So
after Katy, Peter did what many Gen-Xers do in a state of confusion --
he went to therapy. The first thing he asked the therapist was, "Does
this mean I am not in love?" After a couple of sessions, he came to the
realization that a lack of love was not the reason why he couldn't
commit. He also learned it wasn't that he wasn't ready for marriage: He
wanted marriage and a family. He couldn't wait to be a father: "I don't
know many things in life for certain, but what I do know is that I was
meant to be a dad," he said as his face softened. And it wasn't that he
wanted to play the field before he embraced family life: he didn't long
for the bar scene, hookups, or the responsibility-free life of a single
man.

Rather, after hours of analysis, he
discerned that he was truly afraid that something better was always
around the corner -- and it was paralyzing him. At that moment, I could
see his anxiety mounting as his thin shoulders crept up to his chin. He
lamented, "I've met so many great women. I feel like they were missed
opportunities in my life. But, at the same time, I don't want to feel
like the door is closing, I want an escape hatch. I love Molly to
death, but sometimes I think: who else is out there?" he said with
frustration. "What if I am supposed to be with someone else?"

Peter articulated what I heard from so
many of my unhooked subjects and friends: "Until you fully commit, you
want to keep your options open . . . Is there a perfect mate? I
probably have this ideal in my head and I am the first to admit she
doesn't exist. But I hold out the thought -- maybe."

This commonly spoken phrase, "keep your
options open," stayed with me. "Keeping their options open" is a way
many of my generation think they may avoid settling. The limitless
choices this generation faces in all areas of life, including in their
potential partners, play a powerful role in many young people's high
expectations and inability to commit. The more choices men and women
have for potential mates, the higher this raises their expectations;
but the higher the expectations, the fewer the people that will meet
that standard. In the back of Peter's mind was always the question: "Is
there an upgrade out there? What if I settle for version 2.0 and 3.0
comes out ten times better?"

Barry Schwartz, PhD, author of The
Paradox of Choice, contends that an overload of choice carries a
cost. The cost, he says, is that choices can make you question the
decisions you make before you even make them and can foster
unrealistically high expectations. In a study titled "When Choice Is
Demotivating," business professor Sheena Iyengar examined the issue of
too much choice. She and social psychologist Mark Lepper, PhD, set up a
display of exotic jams in a high-end grocery store. In one control of
the study, six varieties of jams were available for tasting. In
another, twenty-four varieties were available. The larger array of jams
attracted more tasters than the smaller array, but when it came to
buying, fewer choices actually meant larger numbers of purchasers. In
fact, the difference was remarkable: ten times more people
bought jam from the smaller display than from the larger. Iyengar
speculates that a large array of options might actually discourage
consumers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into
making a decision. Alternatively, they reason that the effort the
decision-making requires can detract from the pleasure of making the
decision. And finally, they suggest that too many options may diminish
the attractiveness of what people see.

Peter just could not choose his jam. What
he learned through his therapy sessions and own self-analysis was that
his resistance to making a commitment stemmed from his many choices and
consequently high expectations. He feared that if he picked the wrong
person, he might repeat the mistakes of his parents who, in his eyes,
did not have a good relationship: "As a result I have very high
expectations for my spouse and what I want in a relationship. I want to
go into it with total confidence that it is the right person," he
explained with an intense tone.

I understood the obsessive focus on making
the right choice. My high expectations had also paralyzed me in many of
my past relationships. I remember, still with a tinge of pain, the time
my first love sat on the bed of my college dorm room and said to me: "I
just don't know if I will ever be able to meet all your expectations."
He was the first man to say this to me -- but certainly not the last. I
had related to many of my single informants but, oddly, I related the
most strongly to Peter -- though the source of our problem seemed
exactly opposite. My parents were happy, so I was scared of making the
wrong choice; his were unhappy, so he was scared. We both narrated our
problems as if they derived from our personal life circumstances, but
obviously they came from something much bigger and common to our whole
generation.

Peter, like many of the people I
interviewed, became exasperated by his own indecisiveness: he didn't
trust himself -- or love. Falling in love had become an angst-ridden
journey of second-guessing, constant indecision, and perpetual
confusion. He felt he might never know if he made the right choice: "I
hate it when people say they met the person and 'I just knew,"' he
said. "My biggest fear in life is never knowing. That feeling may never
come."